4 ms·

The email workflow is objectively, measurably simpler and it works really well for kernel development. Look at the examples on sourcehut. Yes, it takes a mome

The email workflow is objectively, measurably simpler and it works really well for kernel development. Look at the examples on sourcehut. Yes, it takes a moment to get used to something different, but that's a human problem.

jillesvangurp 6y ago
It works well for people used to command line interfaces to email, mailing lists, and using cli tools exclusively. Old people in other words. No shame in that; I am one. But I'm well aware that I'm a minority. I mostly work with twenty somethings these days. Keeps me mentally younger than I have any right to be. Also forces me to keep updating my skill sets. In any case, I tick only one of those boxes as I use a lot of cli tools (including git of course), aggressively unsubscribe anything that looks like a mailing list (never had the patience for the low signal to noise ratio and horrible UX of having to mentally parse deeply nested threads). NNTP was always superior to that and the last time I worked with that is 15 years ago. I have not used a cli email client since the mid nineties. I considered outlook express to be an upgrade back then. And that wasn't all that great if you think about it. I also used Thunderbird for a while until dropping the notion of having offline email archives on my laptop/computer entirely. These days I use gmail, slack, and a lot of other chat tools. All cloud based stuff. Mostly work related emails are very limited and restricted to interacting with non technical people and alerts/notifications. It is not part of any technical process I've used in the past decade. I actually used git apply patch back in the day when I was transitioning from subversion to git and was stuck in a team insisting on subversion. Pretty cool way to move commits around and it allowed me to work around some limitations with git-svn (no rebases in svn); but not for everyone. The nice innovation of the pull request by Github achieves a similar flow but with a pretty UI, easy to use tools for commenting, line by line review, search, issue tracker integration, and a bunch of other things that IMHO stopped being optional on most projects. I kind of like the traceability of PR #4 closes issue #13 and successfully cleared CI & received a positive review so it is safe to merge. Kernel development has historically catered to the needs of the core committers, most of which have been working on this project for decades and one of which happens to be the inventor of Git. And of course anything kernel related tends to be very cli centric to begin with. And finally they do process a very large number of patches. So their use is very valid of course and I guess any tool changes are very disruptive there given the large amount of stakeholders. The statistics on that project are in any case mindblowing. You can get a good picture of that via Githubs insights on Linus Torvalds fork of linux. I don't think he uses pull requests though. Is there an issue tracker for linux even?
- ddevault 6y ago
  This is a really nasty argument. "Old people" are (1) not the only people who understand mailing lists, (2) not the only people who like mailing lists, and (3) not "set in their ways", so to speak, or failing to "updating their skillset". There are plenty of "twenty-somethings" which use the email workflow. What a gross, ageist comment. >The nice innovation of the pull request by Github achieves a similar flow but with a pretty UI, easy to use tools for commenting, line by line review, search, issue tracker integration, and a bunch of other things that IMHO stopped being optional on most projects. I kind of like the traceability of PR #4 closes issue #13 and successfully cleared CI & received a positive review so it is safe to merge. There is nothing preventing these features from being done with email, either. >You can get a good picture of that via Githubs insights on Linus Torvalds fork of linux. I don't think he uses pull requests though. Is there an issue tracker for linux even? I wrote an article which can offer some insight into the Linux development process: https://drewdevault.com/2020/09/02/Linux-development-is-profoundly-distributed.html https://drewdevault.com/2020/09/02/Linux-development-is-prof...
  - jillesvangurp 6y ago
    If by plenty you mean a vanishingly small minority of twenty somethings, then yes you are completely right. They exist. Just not in very large numbers. I'm merely making the observation that it's mostly older generations (like yourself?) that are 1) used to/familiar with this way of working 2) actually prefer doing so. There's nothing nasty intended here. I think you are taking this way too personal.
    - ddevault 6y ago
      I'm 27.
- u801e 6y ago
  > It works well for people used to command line interfaces to email, mailing lists, and using cli tools exclusively. But don't most people use the CLI to run or edit their source code in some fashion?

jillesvangurp 6y ago

It works well for people used to command line interfaces to email, mailing lists, and using cli tools exclusively. Old people in other words. No shame in that; I am one. But I'm well aware that I'm a minority. I mostly work with twenty somethings these days. Keeps me mentally younger than I have any right to be. Also forces me to keep updating my skill sets. In any case, I tick only one of those boxes as I use a lot of cli tools (including git of course), aggressively unsubscribe anything that looks like a mailing list (never had the patience for the low signal to noise ratio and horrible UX of having to mentally parse deeply nested threads). NNTP was always superior to that and the last time I worked with that is 15 years ago. I have not used a cli email client since the mid nineties. I considered outlook express to be an upgrade back then. And that wasn't all that great if you think about it. I also used Thunderbird for a while until dropping the notion of having offline email archives on my laptop/computer entirely. These days I use gmail, slack, and a lot of other chat tools. All cloud based stuff. Mostly work related emails are very limited and restricted to interacting with non technical people and alerts/notifications. It is not part of any technical process I've used in the past decade. I actually used git apply patch back in the day when I was transitioning from subversion to git and was stuck in a team insisting on subversion. Pretty cool way to move commits around and it allowed me to work around some limitations with git-svn (no rebases in svn); but not for everyone. The nice innovation of the pull request by Github achieves a similar flow but with a pretty UI, easy to use tools for commenting, line by line review, search, issue tracker integration, and a bunch of other things that IMHO stopped being optional on most projects. I kind of like the traceability of PR #4 closes issue #13 and successfully cleared CI & received a positive review so it is safe to merge. Kernel development has historically catered to the needs of the core committers, most of which have been working on this project for decades and one of which happens to be the inventor of Git. And of course anything kernel related tends to be very cli centric to begin with. And finally they do process a very large number of patches. So their use is very valid of course and I guess any tool changes are very disruptive there given the large amount of stakeholders. The statistics on that project are in any case mindblowing. You can get a good picture of that via Githubs insights on Linus Torvalds fork of linux. I don't think he uses pull requests though. Is there an issue tracker for linux even?

ddevault 6y ago
This is a really nasty argument. "Old people" are (1) not the only people who understand mailing lists, (2) not the only people who like mailing lists, and (3) not "set in their ways", so to speak, or failing to "updating their skillset". There are plenty of "twenty-somethings" which use the email workflow. What a gross, ageist comment. >The nice innovation of the pull request by Github achieves a similar flow but with a pretty UI, easy to use tools for commenting, line by line review, search, issue tracker integration, and a bunch of other things that IMHO stopped being optional on most projects. I kind of like the traceability of PR #4 closes issue #13 and successfully cleared CI & received a positive review so it is safe to merge. There is nothing preventing these features from being done with email, either. >You can get a good picture of that via Githubs insights on Linus Torvalds fork of linux. I don't think he uses pull requests though. Is there an issue tracker for linux even? I wrote an article which can offer some insight into the Linux development process: https://drewdevault.com/2020/09/02/Linux-development-is-profoundly-distributed.html https://drewdevault.com/2020/09/02/Linux-development-is-prof...
- jillesvangurp 6y ago
  If by plenty you mean a vanishingly small minority of twenty somethings, then yes you are completely right. They exist. Just not in very large numbers. I'm merely making the observation that it's mostly older generations (like yourself?) that are 1) used to/familiar with this way of working 2) actually prefer doing so. There's nothing nasty intended here. I think you are taking this way too personal.
  - ddevault 6y ago
    I'm 27.
u801e 6y ago
> It works well for people used to command line interfaces to email, mailing lists, and using cli tools exclusively. But don't most people use the CLI to run or edit their source code in some fashion?